


glass towers

by Quilly



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi, Polyamory, all permutations all the time, melodrama what melodrama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8415778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quilly/pseuds/Quilly
Summary: Apart, they shatter. Together, they're bulletproof.





	

**Author's Note:**

> crosspostin from tumbly again. support your local fic writers.

It’s Roxy’s idea that they all move in together after high school. Of course it is.

 

“This way, we can be together,” she says, grinning manically at her friends, “ _foreverrrrr_.”

Her theatrics notwithstanding, it does feel like forever to Jane, a very dull forever, as she listens to the creak of Jake’s door and then a couple of low, muffled giggles. She puts her headphones in and plays her music, but it’s three AM and her mind supplies the rest. She rolls over and squashes her pillow down on her head.

It’s not that she’s sad two of her best friends have found each other, not at all, it’s just…

Her own door creaks open and she feels Roxy’s bony knees against the back of her legs, and she holds Roxy’s hand over her own heart.

Yeah. It feels a lot like this.

…

There’s a subtle shift in the dynamics that even Jake can feel the first time the girls come into the kitchen with hickeys, and he absently scratches his scruff and pours out the coffee. It’s not that he’s stupid, he just never quite realized that they…erm…felt that way.

Roxy skips to the table and sits down with much more perk than should be allowable at this hour of morning, at least before coffee, and she winks at Dirk’s inscrutable gaze.

“So,” he says, and although Roxy opens her mouth, it’s Jane who speaks.

“If you’re so worried about it, Dirk, next time, you can just jump in,” she says, and it’s clear from her tone that she’s been mulling this answer over for a long time—it’s delivered irritably, she didn’t initially mean anything by it, but she’s staring a little too intensely for it to be a throwaway comment now. Dirk goes a little rigid. Jake sits down next to Dirk and shares a look with Roxy, who is looking at Jake, and then slowly grins.

Well, then, Jake thinks.

…

On a whim Roxy’s snugglehopping takes her to Dirk’s room one night. He’s asleep, alone, and curled in a ball so tight it hurts her inside to see him like that.

She feels her usual method of sneaking up from behind might get her clocked, and instead approaches from the front, making little soothing sounds and touching Dirk’s face, and he doesn’t quite wake up enough to realize what it is he’s doing but soon she has him coaxed into something a little easier for hugging, still locked tight but now around her, muttering into her hair. It sounds like calculations to her.

She goes to slip away before he wakes up but in the act of moving she wakes him, and they just stare at each other for a long time before Roxy says the bleep with it and kisses him.

…

Dirk isn’t surprised when, eventually, Jake comes into the workshop smelling like Jane’s vanilla perfume. He isn’t sure how to feel about it, honestly. It’s not like it’s cheating, they’re not even really together, but there’s just…there’s too many variables, too many inconsistencies even in himself. It’s driving him nuts.

This does not get easier when Jake plants his “customary smooch” on Dirk’s mouth and for a split-second Dirk gets a noseful of that sweet perfume and imagines someone very different bestowing on him liplock.

He resolves to forget about it, and almost manages, until he runs slapbang into Jane as she’s coming out of the shower and her towel slips, just a little.

It’s enough.

…

Why they all converge in Jane’s room is beyond her, but she supposes it’s because her bed is technically biggest. How they coordinated to all come on the same night she won’t even try to fathom. She’s simply going to enjoy the tangle of legs and grunts of elbows into guts as they settle around her, hands in hair, knees kicking, a whole lot of pomp and circumstance for a whole lot of cuddling.

They sleep that way every night now, even though invariably one of them wakes up with at least one sore muscle from sleeping wrong and someone always rolls onto Dirk’s hair.

…

It’s when the exchange of kisses moves to the public areas that any of them has an idea of how far things have gone—Jake and Roxy are enthusiastic about their good-morning snogging, Dirk and Jane more conservative, small pecks, little promises. They all shift around to accommodate each other. It takes some time, but it clicks into place—perhaps not perfectly, but functionally.

Dirk fusses over home security systems and Roxy sometimes sits on the roof watching passers-by and Jane bakes and Jake cleans his guns, and it goes without saying that whenever one of them leaves for more than a few days the balance is more than a little tenuous. They’re off-kilter without each other. Just the way it’s always been.

They don’t try explaining it to parental figures, though. Maybe they think they can just get away with not talking about it. They go to school and to jobs, they come home. Sometimes they pair off, sometimes they go by threes, but the early morning hours always sees them back in the same bed, shifting around, getting comfortable.

It’s something fragile, what they’re building, something ironclad that could fall apart at a stray puff of breath, at the wrong name dropped, at the signs read the wrong way once. They are all careful now. They look at each other more deeply, really searching for something wrong, for something to protect, for something to shave away, for something to fix.

Maybe with two or three it would have collapsed long before now.

With four, they are unstoppable


End file.
